[ILUG] real time shell question...

[Justin Mason]

Paul J Collins said:

> If you have job control, you could write a script that backgrounds it,
> sleeps for 20 seconds and then does kill %+, which should kill the
> last-spawned job.  Plain Bourne shell doesn't have job control
> however.

no, that should work.  You can run stuff with &, you just can't fg
it again or use the %- %+ stuff. So this should work:

  for test in `foo -h | awk '{print $1}'`
  do
    foo $test &
    foopid=$!

    secs=0
    while [ $secs -lt 20 ] ; do
      if kill -0 $foopid ; then
	sleep 1
      else
	echo "foo has finished" 1>&2; break
      fi
    done

    if kill -0 $foopid ; then
      echo "foo has timed out, killing it" 1>&2
      kill -15 $foopid
    fi

    wait $foopid		# to get the exit status
  done


Something like that anyway ;)

--j.